serialization-safety

Prevent Unity serialization data loss during field renames by applying the FormerlySerializedAs attribute, which maps old serialized names to new ones to preserve values across scenes and prefabs during refactoring.

SerializeReference enables polymorphic serialization in Unity by allowing fields to store derived type instances, ensuring derived classes are serialized correctly in scenes and ScriptableObjects rather than just their base type.

Unity silently resets serialized values when fields are renamed without FormerlySerializedAs, when private fields lack SerializeField, or when incorrect null checks fail to detect destroyed objects, causing hard-to-trace data loss.

Expose private fields for Unity serialization by adding the SerializeField attribute, which maintains encapsulation by keeping fields private while ensuring their values are preserved in scenes, prefabs, and ScriptableObjects.

Correct Unity null checks use the custom equality operators overridden by UnityEngine.Object to detect destroyed instances, preventing null-reference crashes that standard C# null checks miss in serialized data.

Unity has serialization depth safeguards to prevent infinite recursion and stack overflows; awareness of these limits ensures complex nested references using SerializeReference do not exceed the safe serialization depth.